Week 6 – Dresden and Krakow

 Dresden:

·         The city is beautiful.  Most of the downtown ruins were left untouched under communist rule but about 20 years ago there was a determined effort to restore the buildings, often with painstaking efforts to put the original stone back in its exact spot, even if most of the stones were already repurposed for cobblestone roads, etc.

·         We took a long walk through their equivalent of Central Park as the sun went down, feeling safe among the hundreds of other couples strolling and bikers cutting through.

·         Two thumbs up for Museum of Military History, which was focused only Germany, not the world.  It included no swastikas and Hitler’s name only once that we saw but mentioned Nazis a lot as they didn’t sugarcoat their history.  There was an exhibition on the Allied bombing Dresden and next to it were similar ones of the same horror in Rotterdam and another city the Germans bombed.

·         Tomas gave us a tour of the city.  Art Historian who had good enthusiasm for the details in the Baroque architecture in town and I think could have talked for a week straight without running out of things to say about the architecture.  A lot of it was within the historical context of the royals trying to impress other royals.

·         We rented a tandem bike and rode along the river Elbe.  There’s a 500K route similar to the path along the Danube but it’s pretty crowded

·         We tried a hop on/hop off tour and were underwhelmed.

·         The food was only OK.

·         Over 95% of what we heard on the streets was German, I think.

·         A shout out to Roy for recommending Dresden as a stop.

Cracow / Krakow:

·         We spent 6 nights in town, the longest stay anywhere so far.  A comfortable close to the Old Town.

·         We found freewalkingtour.com offers scheduled tours where you tip what you would like, with the guideline that it should be worth what a movie costs.  We were 3 for 3.  Damian, a historian and former librarian, showed us around the Old Town and gave us an overall history of Krakow. 

·         Tomascz, who I think has a graduate degree, gave us a tour of the Jewish Quarter, covering the first synagogues and life there through the Holocaust.  Karen and I watched Schindler’s List that night in our room (primarily based in Krakow and mostly filmed there) for the second time (the first was in 1994.)  The Third Reich murdered 90% of the Jews in Poland.

·         Tomacz, also known as Big Tom, possibly because he’s 202 cm (6’7”) also gave us a tour of Krakow in WWII – he “promoted” it at the end of his other tour.  The Polish Army left the city to fight the Germans outside town and then the Germans left before ethe Russians arrived so there was little physical damage.  But the Gestapo (short for a version of German State Police) inflicted immeasurable damage on the people.  He once again did a great job bringing things to life, including things like the complexities of the underground resistance.  Poland fought off Russia after WWI to stay independent then lost that status after WWII.  The Soviets killed 20,000 Polish army officers in 1940 (Katyn Massacre) make that easier, and blamed the Germans.

·         Weronika from Sitecore met us for dinner.  She moved here a year ago from an hour away and is still learning the city.  Once again a good connection with somebody I’ve seen only via Zoom.

·         We went on a guided tour of the local salt mine (production shut down 20 years ago), which meant walking 2 of the 200 miles underground and having Elizabethia explain the history of it.  There are salt veins still visible and some miners created sculptures (mostly Catholic) and floor tiles.  As long as the mine controls temperature and humidity they stay hard.

·         And we had a tour of Auschwitz (primarily a workcamp) and Birkenau (primarily a killing camp.)  A gray, rainy, chilly day, which added to the gloom.  It felt like a factory, where the focus was primarily on efficiency but there were mind tricks as well to keep the victims compliant.  The guide was good but not on Big Tom’s level.

·         Sunday was beautiful weather and a lot of walking among crowds of families, including a long walk up to the Tadeusz Kosciuszko Mound, in honor of the solider who helped the American Revolution and then led an attempt for Poland to gain independence in 1820.

·         We met Monique from Sao Paulo on the WWII tour and then walked some more and went on a river cruise and is now a Facebook friend of Karen’s (I won’t have Facebook access until I get back to my laptop in Boston.)

·         Of our 4 tours, with about 80 fellow participants, I think we had only one other from American, Paul, who was from Ashburn, Virginia and on assignment in the Army reserves in Germany.

·         Pedestrians have more right of way here – cars stop for people in crosswalks, even if they seem to wait until the last second to slow down.

·         The language is a notch harder than German.  While getting a haircut, the hairdresser offered me a beer and my smooth reply was “no good morning.”

·         Pope John Paul II and Copernicus are from Krakow.  I think Copernicus would make a good name for a pet.

·         Next time we visit Poland I want to go on a tour on the 2 Warsaw Uprisings (43 and 44) and stay in a smaller town, too.

·         Krakow has absorbed about 170,000 Ukrainian refugees, mostly women and children.  That’s almost 20% of the city’s population and they are generally squeezing into residents’ homes and going to school.  I couldn’t distinguish a Pole from a Ukrainian.  Poland has given higher percentage of their GDP to help Ukraine than all other countries (the US is in the top 5 or 10, I think.)

Misc:

·         Despite the European focus on energy, we haven’t yet stayed in a place that seems to have low flow adaptors for showers.

·         The bikes ad scooters and pedestrians all seem to peacefully co-exist in both cities.  Bikers will generally wait patiently behind a walker for an opening to pass, especially on a crowded Krakow sidewalk.  Most of the bikes we’ve seen in Europe are closer to what the teacher rode at the start of the Wizard of Oz than a typical road bike in America.

·         I’m getting an appreciation for the fluidity of borders over the centuries here.  It would be like the Union deciding to give Garrett County in western Maryland to Pennsylvania after the Civil War and then getting half of it back decades later after some negotiation.